Clay Newcomb, a frontier bear hunter and host of Bear Grease, traces the deep cultural roots of hunting—from Koyukon taboos (like slitting a bear’s eyes to honor its spirit) to 19th-century conservation efforts tied to the Boone and Crockett Club. He debunks media distortions, like "grip and grin" tropes, and highlights hunting’s role in funding wildlife protection via the Pittman-Robertson Act, generating billions for habitat management. Newcomb also shares Arkansas’s wild history, from Gerstacher’s 1854 bear-hunting tragedy to Barry Seal’s cocaine drops in the 1980s, contrasting it with Texas’s elusive jaguarundi sightings and thriving hybrid mule trade. Ultimately, they argue hunting is a misunderstood but vital tradition, blending survival, conservation, and storytelling into North America’s rural identity. [Automatically generated summary]
It's always interesting to meet someone in person when you've heard them on a podcast.
I've heard you, I don't know, a hundred times on the Meat Eater podcast, so to see you in person.
And then to start listening to your podcast, which is Bear Grease, which is...
A hilarious name for a podcast, and if people don't know, bear grease rendered bear fat is actually a very valuable thing, and it's great to cook with.
I'll never forget when I found out about bear hunting, about bears being good to eat, was actually from Steve Rinella.
And so when he's breaking down the bear and taking the fat off, the fat is actually purple because this bear has been eating so many blueberries that it's in its flesh.
And so there was a time when bear grease, bear lard was super valuable on the frontier before refrigeration because bear fat stayed, didn't go rancid as quickly as pork lard.
So like on it, you would have pork and bear would be essentially the places where you would get it.
This lasted longer.
That'll last on the shelf at your house, unrefrigerated, for over a year.
Just whatever the constituency of bear lard is, it just stays good for that long.
So, going back to this metaphor of the name of bear grease, in our podcast, we're exploring things, and even in the tagline of the podcast, we say that we're exploring things that are forgotten but relevant.
And we're searching for insight in unlikely places.
And so like this bear grease, I brought you some stuff that you can do with bear grease.
It's a metal hydroxide traditionally obtained by leaching wood ashes or a strong alkali, which is highly soluble in water-producing caustic and basic solutions.
There was a time when, so there's an archaic unit of measure of a bear oil.
They used to take the tanned neck hide of a deer, which would have been a part of the buckskin that wasn't usable, the neck hide, and they would have sewed it together, and they would have used it to have stored bear oil, and they called it an eel.
And so, again, this idea that there's some pretty amazing stuff that's forgotten.
And then, as hunters, we're very interested in...
In using as much as we can from these animals that we're taking.
Very interested in that.
And so a bear offers a whole other market of commodity that really no other big game offers.
In that, you know, of the big game that we hunt, like, let's say an elk.
I mean, you know, you're going to keep the meat, obviously.
That's the number one thing.
You're going to keep his horns.
But very few people would even keep the hide of that animal.
And certainly they're not rendering down elk tallow.
White-tailed deer would have the same sequence of usable commodities.
Man, a black bear.
We have incredible meat.
I would venture to say that 90%, maybe 80% of black bears that are killed in North America, their hides are tanned.
They have, usually, especially in the fall, have an incredible amount of fat, which can be rendered down into all these incredible, healthy, usable products.
And so, I mean, like, we have...
My point is we use more of a bear than we do almost any other big game animal that we hunt.
They personally use bear fat for cooking and things like that, and they cook a lot of bear, and they're interested in a lot of bear recipes, but they say that they make trades with the elders, and they deliver them bear fat.
We should probably tell people, because all this stuff sounds odd, because when you're talking about hunting in North America, to most people that don't hunt, they think of deer hunting.
That's common.
But during the days where people were traveling across the country, settling, and the pioneers, they mostly ate bear, and they were using deer for the skins.
Which is kind of crazy when you think about it today.
Like that bear was...
Steve Rinella has that great animated thing.
Have you ever seen it online where someone's animated this piece about...
Florida, Arkansas, Oklahoma, out west, Michigan...
Wisconsin.
Like, whatever's happening ecologically right now in North America.
And I mean, you could make a list that would just be bizarre about urban sprawl and fragmentation of wilderness and all this stuff.
Whatever is happening, you know, increase in temperature across the place.
Like, bears are thriving.
Why that makes sense that right now that people would begin to be re-interested in hunting bears is that we've got more people on this continent than we've ever had, obviously.
We've got more overlap of bear country and humans.
We literally are up against the wall in terms of managing these animals.
I mean, they will be managed.
Bears will be taken out of populations one way or another because bears...
For instance, let's take Arkansas.
Arkansas has 2.2 million acres of national forests and that's essentially the core bear habitat in the state of Arkansas.
That is great bear habitat.
A natural bear density in the Ozarks or Ouachita Mountains would be, let's just say, one bear per square mile.
And that would be a fairly high population of bears at a landscape level.
Well, if you have two bears per square mile, that might not seem much to you or me, because we're not bears.
But long term, that is not sustainable.
And bears replicate, basically, a healthy population of bears is going to increase by over 10% per year.
So if you have 100 bears, and the next year you're going to have 110, and then you can do the math.
One time I did the math, and I want to say within 12 years of population, even including mortality, Natural mortality could double in like 15 years if it was just released.
You know, when you start doing the math, 10% per year.
And then you have to do the math with fawns and elk calves and all the different animals they're going to eat and what kind of impact that's going to have.
It took me a while of reading historical accounts of these travelers and these people that were making their way, these pioneers, making their way across the country, and what they ate.
Mountain lions went from—they basically covered the entire North American continent, except in the real far North Arctic.
But, you know, since that time, habitat fragmentation and mountain lion populations are now—they're thriving in the places where they are in the West, and they're moving back into the East, which we did a podcast on.
But black bears would be number two.
The most widely distributed big game animals.
So they were everywhere.
I mean, when people got off the...
I mean, when they...
In the eastern United States, full of bear.
I mean, the eastern deciduous forest, which would essentially be from...
Western Arkansas, all the way to the Atlantic Ocean, all the way to Maine, all the way to Florida, all the way down to East Texas, like one-third of the United States would be the eastern deciduous forest.
All I've ever done with bear is either slow cook it like a ham and make sure it's thoroughly cooked, put a meat thermometer in it, or I've made Ranella's bear candy recipe.
It was basically an anthropologist that went and lived with the Koyukon people in Alaska for an extended period of time.
And he...
Nelson was his last name.
I can't remember his first.
Richard K. Nelson, I think.
Incredible.
Yeah, Make Prayers to the Raven, Richard Nelson.
Oh, incredible.
Okay, so when I got to the section on Black Bear, they had a full chapter on Black Bear.
And they started, they called them taboos.
But okay, so when a bear is found, and these are like...
Kind of spiritual rules that they use in bear hunting.
But if you find a bear, you must speak very cryptically about your plans to go back.
Because the spirit of the bear is aware and he'll hear you.
So if I went out hunting and I found a bear sign, but I didn't kill the bear, and I came back to camp, came back to my house that night, and I wanted you to come with me, I would be like, Tomorrow, I would like for you to come with me around the mountain just to see what we can see.
I'm one of those people that loves calling bullshit.
I'd love to call bullshit on this, but I don't know if I do.
You know what I'm saying?
There's a thing about animals, when you are staring at them, I feel like they get some sort of a little frequency, like a little beep-beep-beep, a little message from the distance where they get uncomfortable.
What I mean by winded, for people who don't know what we're talking about, the wind came from behind you and reached the bear, so you're sent, reached the bear from eight football fields away, which is fucking bananas.
Oh, there was no question that the bear smelled us.
I mean, that's not, in my mind or Steve's mind, really debatable.
But there is more to the story that would help make sense, Joe.
Because we were basically at the foot of a mountain, and to our right was basically a very steep, straight-up mountain.
So we're sitting here.
The wind is hitting us directly in the back of the neck, and it's basically creating a wind channel that directed our scent right to that bear, where if it had been open country, I feel like by the time our scent got there, it would have dissipated.
And there were six of us.
You just see me and Steve on the screen, but behind us was at least four other people.
So you walk up to the bear, the first thing you do, you slit his eyes.
Because they perceive these as like spiritual animals that have power.
Um...
They don't, they very rarely keep the skins of bears.
They don't want a bear skin in their house because they think it holds like authority or power.
So the bear hide is not used as, which you'd think in the Arctic that this would be like an essential for their clothing and whatnot, but they're killing caribou and other things.
And as I get down to these last two, I'll tell you kind of my conclusion of why this is intriguing to me and how I think it relates to me as someone who I don't...
Well, I'll tell you how it connects.
But...
The last thing, well, close to the last thing.
Bear death ceremonies are second only to human funerals.
So when you kill a bear, like, they have an absolute, like, ceremony.
People all over the village would cook food.
And this would be old, more ancient stuff.
I don't know that—I couldn't say how these people live today, but— Basically, like, extreme respect for that animal.
Only second to a human funeral would be the death of a bear.
And they would have these, like, ceremonies and cook and get together.
And it was, you know, I... I feel that way when I kill a bear.
And it's also, as you were saying, if you are going to be a person who's involved in conservation, if you're really thinking about it correctly, they have to be managed in a certain way.
And if you choose to look at it this way, like all animals, they're a valuable resource.
Like deer are a valuable resource.
You eat one or you shoot one, your family can eat it for months.
That's a lot of food.
And the same with a bear.
And if you shoot a bear, you're also stopping that bear from killing a whole lot of fawns, a whole lot of elk calves, a whole lot of...
The study was probably done 10 years ago in Alaska.
And this was a brown bear study.
And they collared 17 brown bears in Alaska.
And they had a video, it was a video collar that took 5 second videos every, no, 15 second videos every 10 minutes.
And the batteries on those at the time, the technology, they would last for like 60 days.
And then the collar would release and they would go gather the collar up.
They were able to, they put them on 17 bears.
7 bears lost the collar so they had data from 10 bears.
And I want to say with seven bears.
This is going to sound bizarre because even as I read it, like I wanted to just be like, man, this is crazy.
But I mean, this came from the biologist in Alaska.
They killed, those seven bears killed over 200 moose and caribou calves in a time of 45 days.
I mean, they were just stomping around.
moose and caribou calves and it was a it was a groundbreaking study because as far as i know it was the first time that it was video evidence so i mean they're they're watching these bears on video it was also really cool because they they they laid out in percentages of time of what that bear did like you know like 80 of the time he was asleep six percent of the time he just stood there
he would stand up and just stand there like i want to say only six percent of his day he actually fed But in 45 days, less than 10 bears killed over 200 moose and caribou calves.
So I interviewed Todd, and then I went and was trained by a professional pistol shooter that talked to me about the sequence of drawing a pistol and shooting.
And then we went to the Montana Fish and Wildlife, and I did a bear simulation, bear charge simulation with a remote-controlled bear that will only go 23 miles per hour.
I mean, to be responsible in grizz country, and to be clear with people, like black bears, I'm not going to say black bears are not dangerous, because black bears do kill people and do attack people.
it is much less likely that a black bear is going to attack you as a brown or grizzly bear which in the united states brown grizzly bears are only pretty much in one general area which would be in northern wyoming idaho montana and they're filtering out into colorado and parts of washington and that's where grizzly bears are the greater yellowstone ecosystem and those bears are very dangerous i mean very dangerous
i think there's already been a couple people killed this summer up there so the the wild part so you need to be responsible and to be responsible means you need to have options and you need to be trained in those options bear spray is highly effective but there are times when you don't want to shoot a bear with bear spray and There are times when it is life-threatening, and a bear is trying to kill you, and you need to take lethal action upon that bear.
I mean, for sure, a bigger caliber is going to be more effective at stopping a bear.
But that is usually not the limiting factor in a bear attack scenario.
Because that big, bigger caliber gun, you may only be able to get one shot off accurately, where with a smaller caliber gun, like say a 9mm, you might be able to get off four accurate shots.
And so the idea, you know, what we say is that choose the handgun that you shoot the best.
Worry less about caliber.
Because for a while, guys were carrying.454 Casals, and I'm not saying that's a bad weapon.
You just need to be able to shoot that thing.
Right, the kick.
Yeah, they're tough.
I shot a.44 mag on this, a.44 mag revolver.
And, I mean, that's a great bear gun to carry.
It has tremendous kick.
To get six shots off quickly with that, accurately, for Clay Newcomb would be very difficult.
unidentified
What was a 9mm? 9mm pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop.
My firearms expert, Jake, on this video, and I haven't seen the ballistics, and there's so many variables with ballistics and different things, but he said a 9mm actually penetrates better in some situations than a.40 caliber.
Do you think that the attribution was due to the fact that they had these complete superhuman abilities in terms of, like, their senses, their sense of smell, and...
You know, again, the full context of the book, you see that they do this kind of stuff with a lot of animals.
Like, they have moose hunting taboos.
They have, like, everything has a way that it's done.
And that's really what I kind of appreciated about it, is that they pay attention, and that they had just a scripted way that they did things, which I... That ultimately turned to respect towards that animal, you know?
Well, it's always interesting when you see people that have lived with animals for generation after generation after generation.
So they're passing down...
that are hundreds if not thousands of years old.
And you get a sense of how important these animals were to these people.
Like one of the stories I really enjoyed on your podcast was the story from the 1800s about the two German bear hunters.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah, that's a great one.
And I really love how your podcast is produced, too.
Whoever's editing it and putting music in it, they're doing a great job because it takes you to a different place with the music and the way everything is, the sound is edited into it.
It's really clever.
Thank you.
And it's something I would tell people, like if you're going to start off with one, start off with that one.
It's a good one.
Because it's representative of, it gives you an understanding of what this is all about without you having an interest in hunting.
Like that transcends.
Like you don't have to be a bear hunter or any kind of hunter in that regard.
Listen to that podcast.
It's really interesting and it transports you to think about what it was like for those people that relied on these animals for their food and how Incredibly risky it was.
And I don't know why I was so impacted by it, but I was.
And I went home and I told my family, and I would use that story, and I would tell my little boys when I would put them to bed, I would tell them that story.
My daughter, to this day, wears a bear claw necklace around her neck.
Like, that story really shaped our family, and for no really good reason.
Like, there's not some big moral of the story.
So part of the quest inside of the podcast was to understand why stories impact us so much.
Like, why does this story matter to me?
And, you know, the conclusion that I came to wasn't that profound except that human nature is, We are drawn to stories.
Netflix is stories.
The Joe Rogan podcast is stories.
Humans are magnetized and drawn to and find significance, find identity.
They understand culture.
They understand value systems.
Like, our way to understand the world is through stories.
Well, without giving away too much of that story, that story has so many dots connected.
Like, first of all, there's a life or death struggle in that one man is seriously injured, the other man is killed.
It's also a camaraderie between animals because they're hunting with their hounds and what initiates him to literally go hand to hand with a bowie knife with his bear was that the bear is killing his dogs.
So he rushes on the bear and tries to stab it to death and gets mauled and killed.
And his friend jumps in and stabs the bear as well and gets his arm ripped out of socket.
It's wild shit because it's got so many things connected together.
And then you've got the dogs that are still remaining alive staying with him.
And then he uses up all of his powder, shooting shots off into the sky to try to alert the rest of the hunting party as to where he is in the dark while wolves are howling around him.
I mean, we're showing and talking about these extreme scenarios.
You know, Daniel Boone and Early 1800s, maybe late 1700s, you know, was reported he and Rebecca and his son, one of his sons on the Big Sandy River in Kentucky, killed 155 bears in one winter.
So it wasn't, like, it's not necessary, it's not always, you know, that's actually the trouble with some of hunting's PR, is that If me and you go hunting, we're going to come back and talk about the most exciting thing that happened, the most dangerous thing that happened.
That's a big issue with perceptions of people who don't hunt, right?
Non-hunters' perceptions are a lot of times based on grip and grins.
They're a lot of times based on maybe you're flipping through the channels and you get on the outdoor channel and some guy shoots a big buck and they're hooting and hollering and high-fiving each other.
And people find it distasteful.
They see it, and they don't understand why everyone's so excited and so happy.
It's because they don't see how difficult it is to get to that position, how much anxiety is involved in shot placement and squeezing the trigger, making sure you don't flinch.
It's hard.
Any kind of hunting and taking an animal's life is very difficult.
So when you see that That success celebration.
People think it's like a celebration of death, of killing.
But it's a celebration of success and of overcoming anxiety and nervousness and the fear of failure and the moment itself, which is so enormous.
The moment when you're squeezing a trigger or drawing back a bow on an animal.
And there's all gradients and scale inside of hunters.
Some people, it truly is a lifestyle.
They've dedicated their life to it.
Others do it less time, whatever.
But when I see a grip and grin photo, I see a lifestyle.
I see somebody that's probably dedicated a big part of their life that's not even connected directly to hunting that has informed their ability to be efficient hunters.
That's kind of what the stories that I'm telling, and even in the future, some of the stuff I'm planning in the future, what I'm trying to tell the story of is people who live their lives close to the land and the other things that happen.
So you always hear some flavor of hunting in most of my podcasts.
Many of them are not about hunting at all.
But you'll see a small window, but you'll see this life.
For instance, there's a podcast that's coming out soon.
And I interview this old guy that really is a legendary hunter.
I'm not going to tell you where he's from.
I don't want to forecast what the podcast is about.
But the whole podcast is about his life.
Very little of it's about hunting.
But it puts it in context.
And it goes, no, that's not just a...
Oh, hillbilly out shooting stuff.
This guy has dedicated his life to this.
This is a very thoughtful process.
This guy, not just his life, his dad's life, and his dad's life before him, was dedicated.
I mean, these guys made a decision.
This is going to be a big part of our life, boys.
We're going to be hunters.
And it affected their careers.
It affected their families.
It affected how many kids they had.
I mean, you know, just like the implications of choosing a lifestyle is so big.
And that's what I think is so profound about hunting.
And that's what I'm interested in.
Because I love to hunt.
Like, I cannot erase that for me.
Like, I do love to hunt.
But I am very interested in how hunting has actually affected my life, how it impacts the character of my children, how it impacts the sanctity of my marriage.
I mean, I'm kind of going out there, but I'm being serious.
I think that what we choose to dedicate our life to has the opportunity to make us better and impact our character and It's just a big story, man.
It's a big story, and a grip and grin doesn't tell that story.
But it's so hard, because it's hard to tell me, Clay, don't post a picture of yourself with a dead deer and you smiling.
And it's like, bro, you want me to accommodate my entire life for you?
I will do that.
I spend much of my life doing that, trying to interpret for people hunting.
But we're kind of asking for some empathy, too, from the other side.
And we've got to do a better job of telling our story.
And there's also that we're connected to what you would call, what the general population would call trophy hunters.
And therein lies the rub with bears.
Is that many people don't understand that bears are food and that it's not just food, it's actually a delicious food and from a conservation standpoint it's actually important to control the population.
But when you see someone posing with an animal, unfortunately it will go to like elephants or giraffes or some unpleasant animal, a lion, where you see someone posing with a lion and then you think about some Canned hunt in Africa where some obese man is standing there with a with a rifle over this majestic animal and it's very distasteful and it infuriates people and rightly so because the image they're getting out of that is some
cruel Sociopath who's just trying to check off boxes.
Have you ever seen Louis Theroux's piece that he did on hunting camps in Africa?
And he goes to South Africa, and one of the best parts about it is he bothers the shit out of the people that run this camp.
He's there forever.
Until they just start talking frankly in front of him.
And he gets all these people who come over there, and they're talking about how much money they're paying.
I want to pay this much to get a hippo, and then I want to pay that much.
And you see these folks, and you see this sort of casual attitude they have about going over there, It's almost like going to Disneyland saying, okay, I'm at Disneyland, I want to ride the Incredibles ride, and then I want to go over here, and I want to do this thing.
It's the same sort of way of describing it, and missing is all of the stuff that I get out of your podcast.
All the stuff of the long, deep history of this and the traditions.
And then, you know, one of the best things about Meat Eater is not just that it's like, like Steve is an incredible narrator and the way he writes those pieces is amazing because it gives you this insight into his mind that is this deeply intelligent, very well-read man who also loves hunting, but also the cooking.
He's always cooking wild game on the show, and you get it.
You get it when you see them cooking over a campfire and eating this food, and it's fantastic.
They're on the mountain, camped out.
It's very attractive.
It's so much better than a grip and grin.
If a grip and grin is the worst way to get people introduced into hunting, Meat Eater, the television show, is the best way.
They arrived into a wildlife bonanza like the earth has not seen since of all the big game animals that we have now.
And they began to hunt these animals for market, for profit.
Okay.
So, you know, the hides of animals were valued.
The meat of animals were valued.
A bear fat was a commodity that could be traded as money.
And so there was much incentive, like Daniel Boone, a lot of these guys, I mean, they made a good living as market hunters.
And when I say good living, I mean, they weren't getting rich, but fur traders could get rich.
And so market hunting was a career.
I'm a market hunter.
That happened from in 150 years, essentially, from 1750 to the turn of the century, 1900. Basically, it was one of the greatest scale demolitions of wildlife that planet Earth has ever seen.
If you ate meat in St. Louis, Missouri in 1820, you were probably eating some kind of wild game.
That was marketed.
That was the mentality.
If it's brown, it's down.
Kill anything.
There was no ethic involved in it in terms of conservation.
That wasn't on people's minds.
It wasn't invented yet.
And in the late 1800s, Teddy Roosevelt and a group of guys that would later form the Boone and Crockett Club, they foresaw the end of North American big game.
They said, the big game of North America will be extinct in the next decade, like gone forever, such that they went out to collect specimens to put in a museum in New York so that future Americans would know what a buffalo looked like.
Because it was going to be gone.
So Americans would know what a mule deer looked like.
And so they...
Basically, these great thinkers of which Teddy Roosevelt and a bunch of them, there were many other men, but Roosevelt was the big one.
They were like, we got to change things or this thing's going to die.
And they created the Boone and Crockett Club, which essentially gave credit, gave cultural value through a numerical number.
A score of an animal.
And so for people that don't hunt, today you might hear a hunter say, man, I killed a 150-inch buck.
Well, for Boone and Crockett, it's just the skull, just for measurement.
The Boone and Crockett guys essentially came up with an ingenious plan that we are going to give cultural value to older age males so that people will be incentivized to take older age males and let the juveniles and females go.
And basically, over the course of about 50 years, they changed the entire hunting culture of North America.
They picked us up from a market hunting.
It's brown, it's down.
There was not much value put on big animals.
You can go back to some of the Native American cultures and see that they put some value on bighorns, but very little.
And I'm not an expert on that.
But essentially, this idea that we're now obsessed with big antlers comes from...
The idea that we want to save North American wildlife, and in a conservation perspective, the best animal to take out of a herd is an older, mature male, because he has contributed to the gene pool, and it is not a loss to remove him.
And so, basically, they had this incredible idea that worked, and so that's what hurts me a little bit.
Like, when you say trophy hunting, I'm like, no!
I mean, what you are describing, I am against.
The semantics of it, though, actually, if you deep dive, and that's where you cannot understand these things if you just gloss over the surface, and that's the problem with so many parts of our world, is people look at a clip off YouTube and go, okay, I understand the whole thing.
That's a part of Louis Theroux's documentary as well, where it explains that a lot of these animals in Africa were on the verge of extinction, and now they're in abundance, but they live in these high-fence hunting ranches.
And it's sort of a weird, bittersweet victory, because the numbers are huge.
They're higher than they've ever been before, because there's value associated with them, because people are willing to pay to kill them.
And it's an issue if you do go back to the whole market hunting thing and people get an understanding of what was happening in North America in the 19th century, they'll get a better appreciation of what was done.
Because with market hunting, having animals on the verge of extinction and then reintroducing them in places like Kentucky where they now have seasons again, Or places like Pennsylvania.
There's a lot of parts of this country where some, like elk, they're gone still from most of their range, right?
I mean, when you see a big bear, when you see a hunter with a bear, with a deer, I mean, really, what you should see through that lens is see protected habitat.
I mean, because essentially, to have healthy populations of animals, we've got to have habitat.
And that is the biggest threat to North American wildlife right now, is just fragment...
Fragmentation of wilderness, urban sprawl, decimation of habitat.
I mean, you know, the stats are easily accessible of, you know, how much of the planet is becoming concrete every single second.
And, man, when you lock in these hunting grounds, I think it's awesome that we still, like, wars for the last...
10,000 years have been fought over hunting grounds.
And today we still kind of do the same thing.
I mean, not wars, but like we set aside areas that this is a place to hunt.
And those areas, public land anyway, are accessible to other people other than hunters.
But hunters are the ones that are primarily funding most of the public land.
It's ingenious.
Ingenious to the point it's almost hard to believe.
It's got to be a giant shocker too when you run those numbers by non-hunters or people that are opposed to hunting and that people who are believers in wildlife conservation but they don't really understand the amount of resources that are involved in maintaining that stuff, protecting wetlands, Protecting, you know, making sure that public lands don't get bought up.
That's an issue too, right?
Some states, they're trying to sell off public lands and people have to act and it gets heated.
It gets really crazy because it's a slippery slope.
We have a really unique situation here too, right?
Yeah, I mean, North America has a hunting culture that's different than anywhere in the world.
And what's so cool about it, too, and Joe, you may know this kind of stuff, but, you know, the European model of hunting essentially boiled down to that people with money, wealthy people, elites, kings, aristocrats were the ones that hunted and controlled land and controlled wildlife.
Yeah.
The reason Gerstacher left Germany in 1837 was to come to this wild, wild place and hunt.
And those guys got here and they were like, you mean we can just go hunt?
I've got a friend that, I tell the story sometimes, I've got a friend that lives in Wales.
And she watches our bear hunting stuff sometimes.
And she says every time...
And she likes it, presumably.
She says every time she has seen me shoot a bear, she gasps because she says, he just shot the king's bear.
Wow.
That's the question.
Like, it's not...
It's just the impulse of her is like, oh my gosh, Clay's going to be in big trouble.
Roosevelt came over here and said, tell you what...
We're going to make wildlife accessible to all the people.
We're going to make public land accessible to everyone.
And everybody would have been like, wait a minute, you sure this is going to work very good?
Like, if we want to have more wildlife, don't we need to protect wildlife?
And they were like, no, we need to incentivize the average guy that he has a right and a place and an ability to go out on land and kill game for his family.
And then you give incentive to everybody to protect, to value, to conserve, to contribute, and it's worked better than anything on the planet.
Well, they're asshole bear hunters and he has to fuck these guys up because he's mad that they shot a bear.
Like, he defends the bear.
I haven't heard about that.
Yeah, but it's that thing where the bear hunters...
The hunters in films are rarely represented as noble people with a deep appreciation for wildlife and sustainability and the fact that this is going to feed and provide nourishment to their family and to friends.
It's a one-step story to tell someone that does not know or has any context into the rural world that these hillbillies killing stuff are bad.
It's a multi-step story to understand it.
If you want to go from zero to an understanding, you've got to walk through all the things we've just described, and you can't put that on a billboard.
And part of the problem is the people who think of hunters as the bad guys Are involved in factory farming in the extent that they buy factory farmed meat.
So they're involved in this weird imprisonment thing where everything is done in the shadows behind closed doors and through the protection of ag-gag law.
So these agricultural gag laws won't allow people that work in these factory farm situations to take photographs and videos because it would unfavorably hurt the business.
So they've made it so that it's illegal to film atrocities.
Where people would be disgusted.
They're like, this is what it takes to get my bacon?
Also, it has the opposite effect that virtue signaling does.
You have to defend yourself.
There's a lot of people that love to talk about how they're vegan.
And one of the things about saying that you're vegan, you're letting people know that you're a very moral and ethical person who cares about life and you don't want anything to be harmed.
So you do no harm and you just eat vegetables.
And so by saying that, you get a free ride with a lot of people.
There's very few people that are going to question, okay, do you understand monocrop agriculture?
Do you understand what's involved?
If you're going to plant corn, how many gophers you have to kill?
Do you have any idea how much pesticide you have to use to kill off the bugs?
Do you have any idea what a damaging effect monocrop agriculture...
When you see hundreds of acres of soybeans, you know how fucking bad that is?
And all the wildlife habitat, pretty much anywhere in the eastern deciduous forest that is row crop agriculture was at one time a climax forest of some type.
Shane Mahoney is a very well-known conservationist and author and speaker.
He's up in Newfoundland, and I heard him say a statistic one time, and I don't have the actual numbers, but essentially if everyone in the United States decided that they were going to be vegan...
We would have to turn the entire United States and Canada into, we'd have to clear the land and have it be row crop agriculture and able to fuel a 350 million person vegan operation.
His point in the numbers there, it's been so long, but his point was there's a massive imprint on this place, even from something that sounds so non-massive about being vegan.
He's written quite a few great things, but one of the things that he pointed to, and it's really an interesting theory, that when you go back to the original North American settlers, they did not talk about massive herds of buffalo.
And he thinks that the Native Americans, with their hunting strategies that they had already had in play, Once they got ahold of the horse, and once they were riding horses, which really didn't happen until the European settlement, it's a crazy sort of convoluted thing, because horses originated in North America, but then they went extinct, but they had already traveled to other parts of the world.
So, like, Asian horses and all the horses the Mongols used originated In North America.
When you think about how long people have been around, and one of the ways that I always describe it, and you have a similar way of talking about it in that bear hunting episode, is that, or was it the deer episode?
I listened to a couple of them.
But anyway, the point is that if the United States was founded in 1776 and people lived to be 100, that's three people ago.
That's not that long.
If you go back three people, you're looking at a completely different place, which is nowhere on earth like that.
Other than, obviously, the introduction of machines and engines and the industrial age, which changed the whole world.
Just the sheer fact that this was populated by nomadic tribes who are subsistence hunting, and then all of a sudden, within three generations, it's completely unrecognizable.
The population of the animals is completely changed.
Some of them have been extirpated out of their land forever, and then there's just this new group of humans from another continent that overwhelm the place.
And what you're referring to is when I was talking to my buddy, my hero, James Lawrence.
He's 72 or something, and he was heavily influenced by his grandmother, who...
I want to say we calculated that she would have been born in the 1800s, and she would have had grandparents just like James that would have been primitive humans.
And we feel like that was so long ago, but, you know, and I'm using James as an example from that one, but I mean, it's in all of us, but like, James is like, he, much of the way that he views the world would be from the direct influence of these people.
It's just an interesting thought.
Especially people who live close to the land, who live in the same places that they always have.
It's incredible how far we've come in terms of, air quotes, progress.
Because it is progress.
but it's really what it is is like technological innovation and the invasiveness of this technology and how it's permeated all aspects of life and all aspects of civilization and how radical that changes over the way people lived for hundreds and hundreds of years with small evolutions small deviations and practice and new inventions and you know different ways to do things And I've heard you talk about this kind of stuff and
It's a common thought process for people to have in this time.
The way that we have lived, even just for the last 50 years, is a bizarre human experience that has never, ever, ever, ever, ever been seen before.
Information and technology.
Just, I mean, us sitting here, us knowing each other.
I mean, like...
In the 1800s, we would have known each other, because you would have lived in Austin, and I would have lived in Northwest Arkansas, and that would have been an 18-day wagon ride, or longer than that.
I mean, this is a bizarre human experience that we're having right now, and that's why, like, if we talk about people changing the rules, and we have this bizarre understanding of time, like, we just show up on this planet, and then we feel like we...
We have answers.
And that's why I'm so concerned with people, specifically with hunting, hunting bears.
It's like we have this one little sliver of time and we decide that we want to change the rules that have governed us for the last 10,000 years.
And it's like, wait a minute.
You just came on the scene like 50 years ago.
How old are you?
And it's not really fair.
I mean, it's like...
And the disconnection of humans from natural places and just a general understanding of the biology of a human and what we have to eat and how we have to live and the natural landscape...
It's so disconnected.
We're kind of in like a dangerous place for people that want to see wild places continue.
And I was talking to Keith Urbane, the guy that's with me here.
He said something last night that put a bunch of pieces together for me, just in probably a three-minute conversation.
But he talked about, he had been reading a book about how the American identity for 200 years essentially was...
Interface with wilderness.
And clearly there's a lot of very negative things.
Genocide, conquest of the West.
We're looking back on that now and trying to understand it and the impacts of it.
But the American identity for so long was our engagement with wild places.
And then all of a sudden...
We're done.
And how that like, we're now we seem to be in this time of trying to understand what is our identity.
And for so long, we had this identity that was deeply connected.
I mean, you know, you look across the nations of the earth and The American identity is pretty tied into, or has been, has tied into wild places and hunting and frontiersmen.
Some of our most famous people were Daniel Boone and some of these guys.
And anyway, we're in a weird place.
And then what we're trying to say is, hey, just because we don't...
There's a revitalization of American identity that should be modernized to fit...
Our world now.
And not to say that everybody should be hunters because they shouldn't.
And not to say that being a hunter is some magical thing that's going to make you a better person.
I agree and I think it's a lack of understanding and that lack of understanding is there's a lot of factors.
This is what we talked about before with the media perceptions or depictions of hunters have been very distorted.
It's very very rare that you see a noble hunter who really truly respects the animal that they shot and killed and Takes time with the preparation and really values each piece of that meat.
You don't see that in films and in television shows.
You see the negative, because they're just trying, they have 90 minutes to get a story out there, right?
And the stories, you know, they're trying to have good guys and bad guys, and the bad guys wear black, and it's real simple.
It's easy to...
Hunters are a great, rude person.
If you've got a guy who's really in tune with animals, what do you do?
You have a drunk asshole hunter and you insert him into your story.
It's a tired trope, right?
But there hasn't been a lot of defense of that on the side of hunters.
Hunters defending themselves or depicting themselves in a positive light.
Because I think up until now...
There really haven't been the resources available.
The wildlife shows, or the outdoor shows, the hunting shows that are on television, are really just preaching the converted.
A lot of them have kill shots over and over and over again, and people hooting and hollering, and it's for the converted.
And oftentimes, and there's some of them, we don't have to name names, some of them are hugely distasteful, even to actual hunters.
You bring up some people that are professional hunters on television, amongst actual conservationists and actual hunters, they get angry.
They get angry about that person.
Like, that motherfucker's setting us back so hard, with all the hooting and hollering, and all the stupid way of talking about these animals.
But with podcasts and with shows like Meat Eater, I think things are changing in a lot of people's perceptions.
I've had multiple conversations with people where they said, I have never even thought about hunting until I listened to A hunter on your podcast describe what it means to them.
And then I started watching some videos, then I watched Meat Eater, or then I read a book.
And then I go, okay.
It's like one of those things where when you're looking at it from the outside, you have a view of it that is not really accurate.
And the only way to really understand what it is I think we have to lay layers upon layers upon layers of these kind of conversations and Discussions and stories and put them out there very carefully So and and be honest about the good and the bad the disturbing the part of the weird feeling of loss like you shoot an animal There's a there's a feeling man when I when I shoot an animal like an elk and I walk on that up to that animal There's a real feeling of loss.
There's a feeling of I'm very appreciative that that animal is going to feed me and my family and a lot of my friends for like a year.
I'm going to be giving out meat.
I'm going to give people sausage.
They're going to send me pictures of it.
Like, look what I got.
Look at what he cooked tonight for dinner.
It's exciting.
It's all great.
But there's a real feeling of loss, and you've got to be honest about that.
All the aspects of it.
And then people need to be educated about where their meat is actually coming from.
There's really good regenerative farming options.
You can buy, particularly, there's a lot of good places in Texas where you can know your rancher.
You can go and see the cows that that guy's raising.
You see the bison they have that they're raising.
And you can buy meat from these ethical people who humanely curate this meat.
And you can have a relationship with them and buy all your food from them.
And it's great.
It's a great option.
But if you're a person who eats meat, and you don't know where your meat comes from, and you're casting aspersions at hunters, You're doing it wrong.
And it might not even be your fault.
I'm not even blaming you for your perceptions, because your perceptions, again, a lot of them are shaped by popular culture.
And popular culture over the last, you know, whatever it is, 100 years, has not done a good job of accurately portraying what's the best aspects of it.
He had a show before Meat Eater called The Wild Within.
And The Wild Within was...
It was one of those sort of life below zero type reality shows where it was...
He told me they were trying to do shit.
They were trying to release a moose and then he shoots it to ensure that they had an animal for him to shoot.
And he's like, get the fuck out of here.
We're not doing that.
But there was a lot of...
What that show was that was interesting to me was his explanation of what these people back then...
Like, he had made a raft out of hide and used it to float down the river.
And, you know, he'd shot this moose and took care of it and did all the field dressing.
And living like that, to me, has always been fascinating.
And I had in my head...
I had this understanding that there was a disconnect between me and food.
That I would go to a store and I'd buy a steak, I'd come home and cook it, or I'd order a steak at a restaurant.
There's so many steps that were missing that my feelings of what a piece of meat were, were wholly inaccurate.
And I knew that.
And then I'd seen a bunch of PETA videos.
So I was like, oh, Jesus.
So I was thinking before Steve took me that I'm going to have one of two options.
Either I'm going to become a vegetarian or I'm going to become a hunter because I don't want to participate in this world where these animals are stockpiled into a warehouse and they're shitting into holes in the ground.
It runs into this giant toxic pond.
Have you seen the drone footage of pig It's fucking crazy.
And so I went with Steve, and my very first hunting experience ever was on video, and you can watch it online.
Yeah, it's cool what the company's doing, too, what MeatEater's doing, and now how MeatEater is connected to all these other really legit companies, too, like First Light, where First Light is now part of MeatEater, and they make this amazing hunting clothing and amazing hunting gear.
It's just nice.
It's nice to see that everyone in that community shares this ethic and shares this deep understanding.
They're all very intelligent people, whether it's Remy Warren, who does his podcast through it, or Ryan Callahan, or all you guys.
That's the first thing Steve told me when he called me is he said, I mean like within like 10 seconds of saying, hey, what do you think about coming to work for me here?
The Tom Cruise movie doesn't really do it justice.
What is it, American Made?
Is that what it is?
It's a good movie, but it's fictitious.
Tom Cruise is quite a bit more handsome than Barry Seals.
But the story behind it is that this guy was running drugs for rogue members of government agencies, whether it's the CIA or whoever, and he was flying into these countries, buying cocaine, and then dropping it off in Mena, Arkansas.
And there's a long story that goes with it where there's two children were murdered two kids that saw the drop and then There was a lie that was told that they were high and that they fell asleep on train tracks and then the family wound up paying for autopsies and the autopsies concluded that they were murdered and stabbed and then you know and then yeah, so so We moved to Meena in 1984 when I was five years old.
But Dad has lots of stories, just over the years, of people that worked at the airport, which I know, I mean, I could list names of people that I know today that worked at that airport.
And there were stories of big jets coming in with no lights on in the middle of the night.
So this is one of the ways, I mean there was more than one way, but one of the ways where they got cocaine into the United States.
They smuggled narcotics into Mena, Arkansas.
There it is, Barry Seal.
Extensive joint investigation by the FBI, Arkansas State Police and IRS revealed that Barry Seal used the Mena airport for smuggling activity from the late 1980 until March of 1984. I was there, man!
According to an internal FBI document released last week, SEAL, a pilot, moved much of his smuggling operation from Baton Rouge to Rich Mountain Aviation at the Mina Intermountain Airport, according to the May 1986 FBI memo.
It's a wild movie.
And it's not totally accurate.
There's better accounts of exactly what went down that you could find.
There would be a line drawn across from the northwest corner, northeast corner to the southwest corner.
The southeastern triangle of Arkansas would be Mississippi River Delta country, like swamp country, producing some of the most – an incredible amount of rice, soybeans, and wheat, like farm country.
From – you go to the northwestern corner of Arkansas – And it is mountains.
It's southern highlands.
And those two places are like two different countries.
And it's that abrupt at different places.
So I was raised in the Ouachita Mountains.
I now live in the Ozark Mountains.
And essentially it would be very equivalent to Appalachia.
And see, I don't know where they filmed that, but I think it was in Missouri, in the Missouri Ozarks.
The topographic core, in terms of ruggedness of terrain, would definitely be in northern Arkansas.
So the Ozark Mountains would cover...
Northern Arkansas and a big part of southern Missouri.
So geographically, it would appear that much of the Ozarks is actually in Missouri, which it is.
And it's beautiful.
I'm not taking anything away from Missouri.
But the most rugged part of the Ozarks is in central Arkansas.
And by rugged, I just mean big mountains, lots of relief, big beautiful rivers, bluffy limestone country.
A lot of caves.
It's karst topography.
Beautiful.
And, you know, anywhere that you plop yourself down on this planet, like, there's incredible history there.
And there's incredible beauty there in its own way.
And so I recognize that where I live is like...
I mean, it's special because...
I've added value to it by being there, you know?
And I've heard it said by kind of an Arkansas philosopher who was describing the Ozark Mountains, okay?
And he said, the Rocky Mountains are grand and majestic.
But the Ozark Mountains are intimate, and if you see a knob, there's probably a pretty good chance that you could walk to the top of it within a half a day.
And that was kind of his—he was like—so, you know, there are much bigger, more majestic views, but— There's beauty to be found everywhere.
So it's just a million people more than the greater Austin area.
So, like, Austin's a million, and then outside of Austin, apparently, is another million, you know, that are, like, closely connected, which is, compared to where I'm from, California, this ain't shit.
Farmland as a human population in the United States has grown from under 3 million to over 300 million, providing millions of raccoons with garden vegetables, fruits, nuts, grain, household garbage on which to feed.
In the 1800s, many areas of the United States supported approximately one raccoon per square kilometer, about three raccoons per square mile.
In 2002, a study of raccoons in Indiana found 222 raccoons per square kilometer.
I have video footage of it, but it's night vision, and it's a cat that seems like it's about in the neighborhood of knee-high, maybe slightly below knee-high.
I'm estimating its weight.
It could be 40 to 60 pounds, something like that.
Who knows?
But it's a dark cat.
And I think it's probably a Jaguarundi.
Because Jaguarundis did exist in Texas, and people have seen them.
I mean, it's hard when you see the guy walk by, I don't necessarily think we should put my neighbor on video, but when you see the guy walk by, you get a sense Okay, I just saw his tail.
So whatever that thing is, I think it's a Jaguar undie because they were native to Texas and the last time they photographed one here was in the 1980s.
But you know how dense Texas is.
You go outside, fucking woods everywhere.
If it's nighttime, you don't know what the fuck's out there.
The idea that some wildlife biologist has combed every inch of this insanely massive state, and they existed here in the hill country.
They're native to this area.
But there's been people reporting pictures of them or reporting meetings of them and citing them, but there's no real photographic or video evidence.
And it's not a high-quality video, so it's hard, but, like, the gait of that animal, like, and I'm, this is why it's so wonderful about these kind of things.
And I don't know you well enough to, like, I don't know if you really want my opinion or if you don't.
So whatever that thing is, I mean, obviously we have grainy footage, but we do have, we'll show you off air, my neighbor, and you'll get a chance to see.
Because when you see that, that's when I went, oh, huh, that's a big fucking cat.
And they're like, yeah, this is not a small animal.
This is somewhere in the neighborhood of 40 or 50 pounds, maybe bigger.
If you really wanted to test out your theory, this is what you would do.
And the biologist told me they'd do this with mountain lion sightings, is take a cutout, like a piece of poster board, and draw a big cat on it, like a big-sized house cat.
Well, man, if you want a spiel, like if you want a little spiel, and I could talk for hours about it, but what's the difference between a mule and a horse, and why would you pick a mule over a horse?
Because that's the biggest question.
Just to inform people, a mule, It's a hybrid cross between a female horse and a male donkey.
And it produces non-viable offspring.
And there's a term in animal breeding called hybrid vigor, which means you cross two distinctly different animals.
Hybrid vigor could be used in a lot of different ways.
But essentially, hybrid vigor means that the offspring of these animals is greater than the sum of the individual animal.
Yeah, like, and so a mule has all these incredible properties that made it super valuable.
And that's part of the reason in the Ozarks, like, the Ozarks and the Southern Highlands of the United States are known as, in many ways, it could be argued, but as like the mule epicenter of the world.
Like, a lot of mule trainers, a lot of mule work, and it came from Many, many things, but mules handled the heat better than a horse.
Mules have more stamina than a horse when worked, and so that's why you hear people talking about plowing with mules.
I mean, you can plow with a horse, too, but a mule would have more stamina.
A mule's feet don't have to be worked on because a donkey is essentially not that much different than a wild animal.
Donkeys would have come from somewhere in the Mediterranean.
There would have been wild burrows and different things.
A donkey is pretty close to what it was.
A horse has been highly, highly influenced by human selection over thousands of years.
And so you get this animal that has been very much so built for our purposes.
In general, if a horse is not shooed, it will go lame and not be able to work much.
So that's why there's this whole farrier industry, which is where people put shoes on horses.
Because if they're acclimated in a certain way, they can become—they don't have to have shoes in the wild, obviously, but they're not doing work either.
They're not having a bunch of people on them.
They're not working.
And it's kind of one of these deals.
Once you start, you can't stop.
So if you start shooing an animal, just like us wearing shoes, if we walked around from the time we were born barefoot, the biggest point and the main thing I'm talking about is that a mule has extremely sturdy, hard feet, and so you don't have to shoo a mule.
Some people do, but typically you don't have to.
So less maintenance.
And that's a major thing.
If you have a horse, man, you've got to shoe that thing every six weeks.
A lot of investment.
A mule won't founder.
And that may not seem like that big of a deal, but if you're an equine owner, if your mule gets in your barn and has access to 50 pounds of grain...
It means that if your animal has access to grain and it eats, eats, eats, eats, eats, It's an intestinal condition where basically the animal eats too much of the super rich food and just dies.
But the main reason that a mule would be the chosen animal for mountain riding is they're known to be safer than a horse.
What makes a horse a wonderful thing is that they're very trainable, easy to train, such that They say that you could train a horse to run off a cliff, okay?
You could make, because when you're on that animal, you're in charge of it, and you could give it the cues to make it do something that would endanger its life.
And in most circumstances, that's a great thing, because, I mean, like, you're in charge, and this animal's doing what you want it to do.
A mule has a very strong self-protective mechanism in it that most people would perceive as stubbornness.
So you hear people talk about stubborn as a mule.
Well, what that is is a self-protective mechanism on that animal.
That animal, you ride a mule up to a raging river out in Montana.
Buddy, you want to be on a mule because he ain't going to cross that creek if he's going to die.
So if you're on his back, you're going to be safe.
If you cue him to go up the side of this bluffy mountain, if he'll go, just trust him.
A horse might get up there and roll off.
And I'm not talking bad about horses.
I mean, horses are dominant, the most, for sure, most popular equine animal.
Mules are about 10% of the equine world.
But what I love about mules, what I love about them, is that they're very difficult to train.
And that's why people don't go to them as quickly as they do a horse.
They're very difficult to train.
But a well-trained mule is an incredible animal.
And it's an incredibly safe animal.
And I want to be on the back of a mule when I'm in rough country.
But the thing that works against the mule, I should be like the mule marketing guy for the planet.
Because we need some better PR.
Because what happens is people get a mule, don't understand how a mule works because he thinks way different than a horse.
Much more difficult to train.
And a mule never forgets.
I had a—yeah, well, I'll tell you something somebody else said.
A mule never forgets, and you can mess up a mule very quickly.
And so what happens is I get a mule and start to train it, start having some problems with him, and problems could be— I mean, just a variety of different ways.
And then I sell that mule because I can't do anything with it.
And the next guy gets it and he starts adding problems because he's getting a mule with a problem.
And then basically a mule has five different owners and every one of them has put their own problem on that mule.
And that mule basically becomes like a wild beast.
And so people know like stubborn as a mule, man, you don't.
I mean, you'll hear a lot of legit cowboys and guys say, man, you don't want anything to do with a mule.
What I learned that I had to do was get mules from the time they were young.
I didn't want a mule that had been messed with by anybody else.
I want to know every interaction that that animal has had with a human.
I've had a lot of luck with that in training these mules.
I love it.
They're safe in the mountains.
The reason I want to ride mules is to get deeper into wild places and stay longer.
And there's some romance involved in it, which I have zero shame over.
Sometimes when I ride mules with Rinella, he's like, we could just walk.
But then outfitters out west sometimes have big herds, big stocks of animals.
So the mule trade world is...
There's a lot of...
There's trainers all over the country, and there's great Western mule trainers, but there are a lot of trainers in the East that train mules year-round, and then they take them to these big mule sales in the Western United States and sell them for big money.
So this is a secret I will let you in on.
You could come to Arkansas and buy a mule for $1,000 that you'd pay probably $4,000 to $5,000 just for hauling them and selling them somewhere in Idaho.